The Best American Essays 2016 (44 page)

We fuck with a tender contempt. Or we fuck tenderly, and contempt mediates.

We climb over a rise, and then, what I want to see: a Forest Service sign. I have a right, like any American, to fuck on public land. I pull the car over. Its front faces a ranch with a big two-story cabin-style house. He seems nervous. I am thrilled.

I’d pictured us making out outside the car in the wind, to build more heat, but he wants to get right into the hatchback. I acquiesce, stepping out of my cowboy boots, spreading the blanket onto the scratchy gray floor of the folded-down seats.

I lean down, to slip open his buttons with both hands and mouth.

He fucks me in the hatchback. It has to be a hundred degrees in there, the sun pouring through the windows. Sweat pools in gray drops on his forehead. Only one falls on me before he brushes them away with the back of his hand. Our bodies slide around on each other. I hold his hips against me. Finally his face clenches. It is over. The windows of the car are fogged. “Like
Titanic
,” I say, moving like I’ll run my hand down the wet window, and he rolls his eyes.

“If you’d said that during, I’d have killed you.”

We crack the doors. Fresh, cool wind pours over our bodies. We are dry in moments.

“It’s so nice not to have to put in extra effort,” he says as we drive back to town. And I laugh.

“Yes,” I say. He puts his hand on my thigh.

I could have used an orgasm, but I don’t actually care. I’m leaving the country at the end of the week; his training will end, and he’ll move to Seattle. I suspect we’ll never see each other again. I love that this does not concern me.

On the way home, I buy jalapeño chips at the Shell station and crunch loudly on them while I drive. I lick my fingers and absorb the salt. I feel delicious. I feel amazing. The whole valley is coated in perfect desert light, the high rolling hills covered in a white sheen.

GEORGE STEINER

The Eleventh Commandment

FROM
Salmagundi

T
HE EMINENT LOGICIAN
W. V. O. Quine invoked “blameless intuitions.” Such are the best I can offer.

Hostility to Jews, or Jew-hatred, is as ancient as Judaism itself. The oppression of Jews, attempts to ostracize them from prevailing society long predate the analysis in Josephus’s
Contra Apionem
. Contempt, hatred, violence against Jews and Jewish communities never cease. Can we spell out some of their invariants?

The origins of monotheism are manifold and hybrid. They direct us to the solar cult in the Egypt of Akhnaton; to the ironic speculations of Xenophanes (if cattle had a God he would wear horns). Diversities of monotheism can be made out at diverse points and legacies in the ancient Middle East, in Iranian pieties. Within Judaism the adoption of any strict monotheism is gradual and marked by mutinous reversions to archaic pluralities. There are “sons of God” and manifest traces of polytheism in the Psalms. Local, tribal sanctuaries long persist. The Prophets engage them in fierce polemics. Relapse into idol-worship and pagan sacrificial rites is a perennial threat.

Paradoxically, it is with the loss of secular power and the destruction of the Temple that a rigorous monotheism asserts itself. This assertion entails a singular, unsparing exigence of abstraction. It posits a deity which prohibits any iconic figuration. There is to be no imagining of God in any incarnate or mimetic forms. His internalized presence is as blank as the desert air. Ethical imperatives are not conceptualizations of divinity, but footnotes to His inconceivable “thereness.” He “is what he is,” insubstantial as is the fire in the Bush.

These prescriptions challenge, indeed contradict, deep-lying, as it were, organic impulses and needs in the human psyche. Common man feeds on representations, as Schopenhauer taught; understanding seeks out the concrete. The imperious negations in Jewish monotheism have been known to elicit repulsion, indeed terror, in the gentile. There is something radically human in Pompey’s revulsion when he confronts the total emptiness of the Holy of Holies. Christological trinitarianism, the teeming Christian iconographies of the God-family, the legions of saints and graphic relics embody a vehement dissent from authentic monotheism. They people the imagined reaches of eternity. As Nietzsche noted, the pagan world and its Hellenistic-Christian derivatives crowd nature—the nymphs in the brook, the elves in the forest—with benign or demonic presences. These are busy in the everyday. Judaism leaves man almost monstrously alone in the face, not to be imaged or conceived of, of a Deity, of an absent immediacy which has had no personalized meeting with God since Baruch.

One asks: do certain constants in Jewish moral and intellectual history relate to this vexing apprenticeship of abstraction, of abstention from the iconic? These are eminently manifest in Spinoza. In the wholly disproportionate contribution of Jewish thinkers to modern mathematical logic, to set-theory, to mastery in chess. Do they have affinities to the development of atonal and twelve-tone music? Schoenberg’s idiom seems peculiarly apposite to the central definition of the Almighty in
Moses und Aron
: “unimaginable, inconceivable, invisible.” Consider Kafka’s resort to the silence of the sirens or Wittgenstein’s celebrated injunction at the close of the
Tractatus
invoking a necessary silence in respect “of that of which one cannot speak.”

The hell of the concentration camps defies linguistic means of description and comprehension. The systematic torture and elimination of millions renders somehow obscene the pretense to a verbalized epilogue. Even the mourning which comes closest—that of Paul Celan, of Lanzmann—falls short of the incommensurable. Horror is, or should be, struck speechless. Can one “think” the Shoah, where “thought” inescapably is concomitant with articulation, even entirely inward? There may therefore be contiguities—how could it be otherwise?—between the incommunicable “zero at the bone” which is Auschwitz and the legacy of abstraction, the inspired nihilism at the bitter core of Sinaitic monotheism. Have such contiguities scandalized and provoked?

A second motive of detestation, documented in antiquity, is Judaism’s claim, already Abrahamic, to the status of a “chosen people.” In the liberal West, Jewish fears and profane ecumenism have queried, debated, attenuated the meaning of such divine predilection. Ought it not to signify “a people chosen to suffer,” to be a witness unto God’s universal regard for all men and women? But despite such a pacifying gloss and such apologetic good sense, the archaic postulate of uniqueness, of a neighborhood to God more proximate than that allowed to any other ethnic community, persists. It hammers away beneath a rationalist, even humorous surface (Ronald Knox’s “How odd of God / To choose the Jews”). The claim has never ceased to infuriate non-Jews. In the genesis of Nazism it triggered homicidal imitation and parody. Today the allegories of election are operative in the aspirations to divinely underwritten promises of homecoming and territorial sovereignty instrumental to Zionism. Add to this the tradition whereby the dying Moses asks God that henceforth the divine epiphany should be granted solely to Israelites. Contested by Amos, this plea for uniqueness is reiterated in such apocrypha as the influential
Testament of Job
. “Let intimacy with transcendence be ours alone.” An awesome arrogance can be inferred.

The persona of Judas crystallizes but by no means initiates the millennial association, charged with both panic and contempt, between the Jew and money. The primal ambiguity of money—key to happiness, root of all evil, at once blessed and satanic—is virtually universal in social perceptions and symbolism. Even rationalized, money retains its demonic aura. The sensibility, the history of the Jew are taken to be inextricably inwoven with that of wealth, with Mammon and the Golden Calf, with Shylock and Rothschild. Those thirty pieces of silver, emblematic of Judas’s treason, modulate into the Christian enforcement on the Jew of the sin, of the corrosions of usury (so formidably chanted in Ezra Pound’s Usura canto). The Jew is compelled to “make money,” a loaded phrase. The yield is simultaneously precious and excremental, as psychoanalysis seeks to explain. Moneylender and alchemist, the Jew manipulates, masters, fructifies the occult yet also supreme rationale and functions of money as does no other ethnic community. With the instauration of modern capitalism, of investment finance and the money markets, literature will quicken atavistic fears into profane urgency: witness the role of the Jew in Balzac, in Trollope, in Zola’s
L’Argent
. On the analytic front, econometrics, the Nobel in economics are all but a Jewish reserve.

Observe the deranged contradiction: Jew-hatred is directed at both the Bolshevik
and
the capitalist! The Jew is seen (justly) to play a leading part in utopian socialism, in the vengeful rejection of unequal riches and monetary values which gives to Marxism, to Marxism-Leninism their prophetic, messianic charisma. Their promise that “gold will be used for toilet seats.” On the other hand, Wall Street, the esoteric juggleries of high finance, the bourse are stigmatized as expressions of Jewish plutocracy. They are distinctive of the Jew as Marx, himself a Jew, proclaimed. How can anti-Semitism have it both ways? No defiance of logic, no schizophrenia takes us nearer the absurd, irrational, but also entrenched, visceral sources and substance of Jew-hatred than does this simultaneous mechanism. In the outpourings of libel and caricature, the Jew is both the “bloodthirsty Red” and the pinstriped mogul.

Dispersed or confined to the ghetto, despised and subject to violent persecution, be it under Domitian, in the medieval Rhineland, in the Spain of the Inquisition, in the Russian pogroms and, apocalyptically, during the Shoah, the Jews have continued to exercise on the gentile world an unsettling, exasperating moral pressure. It is the
blackmail of the ideal
.

I have already adverted to the overwhelming, counterintuitive, perhaps in some sense unnatural exactions which Mosaic monotheism would impose on human reflexes and feelings. Christian polytheism, the compromises engaging the “Son of Man,” the Man-God, have never effaced certain deep fissures and tensions within Christianity itself. The reproachful specter of genuine monotheism stalks the canonic multiplicities of Christian doctrine. It surfaces in such hybrids as strict Calvinism, Jansenism, and the Unitarian arrangement. It resounds in Pascal’s agonized appeal to “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” The refusal of the Jew to participate in such mythologies makes a hostage of Christianity “unto the end of time,” for there can be no Second Coming so long as the Jew does not enter
freely
into the
ecclesia
.

Next came the uncompromising imperatives of Sinai and the Decalogue. Commandments out of common reach and the norm of human conduct. We are to cherish our neighbor more than ourselves. Smitten, we are to offer the other cheek. We are to forgive whatever injury is done to us. We must share our portion of worldly goods. Directly inspired by the Mosaic precedent, by the psalms and the prophets, Jesus is no more thoroughly the Jew than in his Sermon on the Mount. He affronts man—this is the right word—with behavioral criteria and ideals far beyond natural instincts and the resources of spirit in everyman. The Galilean propounds axioms of
caritas
, of mutual altruism, of disinterested love and
agape
, the key Pauline rubric, which only the sanctified, the “latter-day saints,” can hope to enact. Who can satisfy the Pascalian ordinance that “the self is hateful” rephrased in Levinas’s Talmudic exaltation of the primacy of “the other”? But in excess of our means these prescriptions plague us with their unattainable value. Perfection as blackmail. The necessary hypocrisies, the mundane bargains, the gymnastics of absolution and self-forgiveness by which women and men conduct their private and civic affairs are encoded by the most adroit public relations virtuoso in history: by Paul of Tarsus. From whose tactics of grace and dispensation the Jew-hatred in Christianity takes its lasting, theologically buttressed contagion.

I have already referred to the third major indictment of average humanity: that formulated by utopian, messianic modes of socialism, especially Marxist. The abolition of private property, the promise of equality, the exchange not of money but of trust for trust promulgated in Karl Marx’s 1843 program are rooted in Judaic aspirations, in what one might call the left wing of the prophetic inheritance. The territorial, proprietary, privately oriented motivations of the “human animal,”
la bête humaine
, do not only counteract these Edenic prescriptions. They do not only inspire fear and insurgence. They bequeath a toxic residue of guilt. No one fuels more detestation than one whose exemplary ideals we acknowledge, inwardly, to be justified but feel ourselves incapable of matching. (I
know
that there are spare rooms in my privileged house, but do not share them.)

The Mosaic summons, the witness of the seer from Nazareth, the exigencies of messianic socialism (as codified in certain fundamentalist
kibbutzim
)—three variants on the Judaic demands for perfection. On the didactic absolutism of altruistic merit, our instincts and pragmatic resources are found wanting. Hence millennia of resentment and enmity. All of which Adolf Hitler summarized succinctly in one of his reported table-talks: “The Jew has invented conscience.”

And yet he endures. There are today more Jews thought to be alive on the planet than there were prior to the Shoah. If this is indeed so, it is a scandal (in the grave sense of Greek
skandalon
), an enormity difficult to grasp. Out of homicidal decimation, like no other in history, out of an explicit, systematic death sentence emerges not only a ghostly remnant of survivors but the contested land of Israel and the good fortune of North American Judaism. Jews have returned to Berlin. There is probably no way of gauging the psychic damage done, the scars left. The Jew, descendant of measureless hurt. He may harbor within him a covert derangement. But he is, and that existential banality defies likelihood and horror.